There are many working environments in which teams of coworkers alternate between on-duty status (actively performing tasks) and off-duty status (resting and/or sleeping). For example, flight crews on long-haul flights, flight crews performing several shorter flights per day, truck drivers, ship crews, medical personnel, emergency response services, surveillance teams (e.g., power plants, border control, and security), firefighters, and military personnel are subject to such alternating work cycles.
As is generally known, planning alternations between on- and off-duty statuses can affect team performance. The quality of rest/sleep in the off-duty status depends not only on length of the rest/sleep, but in great part on when the rest/sleep ends. For example, the untimely waking of off-duty personnel may spoil up to one hour of sleep. This can, in some instances, be a significant fraction of rest/sleep allocated to the off-duty personnel before alternating back to on-duty status. As a result, the person may start their on-duty period in a drowsy state, and with reduced vigilance. This can lead to the person making unintentional errors.
Current work alternation practice tends toward relatively short on-duty and off-duty times. The alternations are pre-planned, with substantially regular intervals, and with only a limited number of allowed on-duty periods. For example, truck drivers may be required to alternate at least every 4.5 hours, and may be allowed only three on-duty periods per day. For longer shifts, the number of persons in the team may be extended. In some instances, work alternation scheduling utilizes flexible planning, where time awake or the time-of-day are taken into account to schedule rest/duty periods.
While generally safe and effective, each of the above-described work alternation scheduling approaches suffer certain drawbacks. For example, these approaches do not account for individual characteristics and modifications due to non-normal conditions, e.g. illness, suboptimal sleep in previous days, overall fatigue, difficult duty period etc. These approaches are fixed or pre-planned unless team members agree on a change, but the agreement must still be made in advance to be efficient. These approaches do not reflect the real-time state of the on-duty person. For example, the on-duty person may be able to continue to perform at a high-level beyond the agreed-upon alternation time or, alternatively, may exhibit degraded performance well before the agreed-upon alternation time.
Hence, there is a need for a system and method for planning and executing on-duty/off-duty work alternation that account for individual characteristics and modifications due to non-normal conditions, are not necessarily fixed or pre-planned, and reflect the real-time state of both the on-duty and off-duty persons. The present invention addresses at least these needs.